Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Three strong-willed women strive to forge their own paths amidst the wide-open plains of the American Northwest: a lawyer forced to subdue a troubled client; a wife and mother whose plans to construct her dream home reveal fissures in her marriage; and a lonely ranch hand who forms an ambiguous bond with a young law student.
Certain Women is a quiet, elliptical Kelly Reichardt film built from three loosely connected vignettes set in rural Montana. The acting is exceptional across the board — Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, and especially Lily Gladstone (in a largely wordless breakthrough performance) bring extraordinary depth to underwritten-on-paper roles. Cinematography by Christopher Blauvelt is stunning, capturing the vast, cold landscapes with a spare, wintry beauty that perfectly mirrors the film's emotional register. The plot is deliberately minimal and episodic — Reichardt's signature mode — which works thematically but may leave some viewers cold; it rates above average but not exceptional as pure storytelling. The film's novelty lies in its tone and patient observation rather than a radically new concept — it perfects a mode Reichardt has honed across her career, earning a solid but not outstanding novelty score. The endings of all three vignettes are characteristically open and understated, resonant but not surprising for fans of the filmmaker's style.